Chapter 208

Distance covered: 490 km (total 8633 km)

I woke up at 5:40 and forced myself to run to the river and back, which is a total of 5.4 km according to Baidu Maps. I didn’t bring the dog along; he tends to stop to sniff everything and I wanted to do an uninterrupted jog.

To go with our habit of patronizing the same places, we ate breakfast at the same eatery we went to yesterday. Some people praise the variety of flavors in Chinese cuisine but don’t care for traditional Chinese breakfast food, but I for one like it quite a lot. Hard-boiled eggs, porridge, soy milk, some long strips of fried dough (called youtiao, like a donut but not sweet), stuffed buns, sure it’s not as interesting as the explosion of tastes you get in lunch of dinner dishes, but it’s good, filling, and so inexpensive I wonder how can those places even turn a profit.

Over greasy breakfast, we discussed travel plans. They had decided to skip Xinjiang altogether, after a bunch of mama-in-law’s friends got turned back one checkpoint further than the one that cockblocked us. One of them had been to the city of Wuhu, which has a suspected Covid case, and that was enough. Too bad, I was really looking forward to go back (after my visit in 2010 on my way to Kazakhstan) and visit the places in the south I had skipped the first time around, like Kashgar. And I also wanted to witness, as much as I could, the tense political situation there.

So we headed southwest towards Qinghai. The creepy lifeless flat desert scenery eventually turned into sand dunes, like the Sahara, and on the horizon we could see mountains appearing, some covered with snow. The road started snaking through those mountains, and the view was breathtaking. We stopped at a viewpoint to walk around and take pictures, the dog was happily running and sniffing everything, and then I saw a huge bird of prey gliding a few hundred meters overhead. I got the dog’s leash, because even though he weighs 6 kg (we weighed him yesterday on one of those scales in front of drugstores), the bird was magestically gigantic and I have no idea if he could take him or not. Plus, the area was full of marmot burrows (with a sign by the road saying not to shove an arm in!) and there was a herd of sheep grazing, that the dog eyed curiously. The temperature had dropped 20 Celsius in less than an hour, going from the dusty desert to these verdant mountains, and I was pretty happy with that.

On the other side of the mountain, we stopped at a small town to fill our water bottles and buy beer. In front of the store were three rough-looking men having 10 AM beers and speaking in a language that sounded as if they were choking on a handful of fish bones. I asked the shopkeeper if he understands and he said he has no idea, they’re Kazakhs. On my way out, one of them tssktssktssked the dog and extended his hand to pet him, I engaged a conversation.

“You guys are ethnic Kazakhs?”

“Yeah, what’s your ethnic group?”, the bald one barked in heavily accented Chinese, sneering.

Weird question! “I’m a laowaizu” (“ethnic foreigner”)

They didn’t seem to appreciate my quip. Those western Chinese visible minority guys aren’t typically a very friendly bunch, and I can’t blame them for having a chip on their shoulder. They make mean barbecue though.

We kept going through grassland-covered hills and then entered a patch of desert we were not to come out of until late the next day. There must have been just enough moisture to turn the sand into something like rough concrete and form monoliths, that had a different shape depending on the wind, I guess. Some were round like the hills in Super Mario games, some had a long gradual slope on one side and a steep one on the other, and some looked like stupas or vol-au-vent flaky pastries. Surreal, and awesome.

We stopped at a shallow salt water lake. There was another tourist SUV there, with its occupants walking around. Just as we were about to leave, mama-in-law frowned and said “Aya! That woman just dumped a bunch of garbage!”

Baba-in-law and mama-in-law are well-mannered and if more Chinese tourists were like them, they wouldn’t have such an horrible image abroad.

“Should we do something about it?”

“I’m going!” I opened the door and jumped out. I gathered the pile of plastic bags and empty cups and walked to the woman and her daughter (the shitty example they gave to their kid grated my in-laws almost as much as the intrinsic act of littering).

“This is yours?”

“Uh... uh... we were about to take it away, thank you, thank you, just put it by our car”, she babbled.

Yeah fucking right. And my name is Abraham Lincoln.

I opened the door and dumped the whole pile on the driver’s seat. Of course she was mad, and reiterated without much conviction that they were about to carry their shit away. I’m sure every sprawling pile of rubbish everywhere the Chinese go in numbers is also something they were about to carry to a proper disposing place but just forgot.

Normally the girlfriend and the in-laws don’t approve of my brusque manners and unChinese, unCuntfucian, unharmonious way of dealing with scumbags. But this time their hatred of pollution took over, and mama-in-law nodded while she handed me a tissue to wipe my hands with.

We kept going further and further into the desert, on a tourist road named “Mars Road Number One”. It did look like the red planet, indeed. There was even a “Mars Base” established there, with low buildings grouped together to look like a space colony, some kind of domes made from triangular white plates, and they rented astronaut suits for photo ops. My jaw dropped at the infinite tackiness of the place, though I couldn’t hate it, it’s quite original, way more than those Yuan Dynasty temples built in 2019.

A caravan of RVs were parked in a square formation, and the in-laws proposed we pitch our tent nearby. I wasn’t too down with the idea. What’s the point of coming to the desert if we’re going to camp with a dilapidated garage on one side, a group of RV enthusiasts who are more likely going to be extremely loud on the other, and an ice cream stand with a noisy generator behind them? I pointed at the vast expanse of desert 360 degrees around, went on a preliminary recon with the dog, and eventually they reached me with the Subaru.

It was quite windy, but I couldn’t find anywhere that was sheltered. We set up the tent on the leeward side of the car, which alleviated it a bit, and the girlfriend had the idea of stuffing bags and suitcases between the inner and outer flaps of the tent to stop the outer layer from flopping back and forth. This would spell disaster in case of rain, but it worked quite well.

Two SUVs appeared a bit further in the valley we were in, parked, and deployed a tarp. And then another one. Here goes our quiet evening, I brooded. We can’t be that surprised though, being so close to a tourist spot, and with most visitors unwilling to pay the out-of-this-world retarded prices to spend the night in one of those space capsules.

I was in charge of making dinner. In between sips of beer (first a local thirst-quenching light lager, then a porter from a South African brewery called Drifter), I boiled water, cooked pasta, drained it, made a sauce with bacon, salami, cherry tomatoes and a jar of bolognese, mixed it all, and topped it with cheese. We sat around the camping table and ate it with a can of herring. It was nice but the pasta went cold very quick, in that weather more reminiscent of autumn than summer.

The dog went to investigate the two other camps, hoping his cuteness will bequeath him a few morsels of meat. I went to get him, as good as an occasion as any to go say hi. There was a couple from Chongqing, eating the spicy hot pot their region is famous for, and three kids from Beijing, cooking mutton and potatoes on a hot plate. We exchanged pleasantries, talked about where we’d been, and compared each other’s glamping equipment. Eventually, all of us climbed a small hill to see the sunset over the western horizon. Just another nice day overlanding in China.